


Epilogues

by Scuffin_MacGuffin



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 07:04:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scuffin_MacGuffin/pseuds/Scuffin_MacGuffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There are some stories Varric will never tell.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epilogues

**Author's Note:**

> Originall written for [ this prompt](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/7619.html?thread=30111683#t3011168) at the kink meme. Meant to be an h/c story about the aftermath of rape that does simplify or parody its tragedy and also does not strip the character in question of their agency and personality (failings which seem to me to be unfortunately common). If I have in any way failed to respectfully accomplish these ends, I would be grateful if you could let me know. **Warnings,** obviously, for descriptions of/references to noncon.

+

Around Hawke, the water curls pink: the cloying, sappy color of a lady's demur toenail, or of fine Orlesian perfume. Pretty things with such dark hearts. Pretty, dark things -- between lips, between legs.

Hawke doesn’t know if she'll ever stop bleeding; Hawke doesn't quite know if she should care. She will stay in the bath until something changes, one way or another -- until she stops bleeding, until she starts caring. Until her mother stops waiting timidly outside the door. Lethargy is easier than terror, and that's the only other thing left to her. She can still feel hands, on her thighs, her knees, rough hands with dirt in the creases of their palms, under the nails. Rough voices, dirty voices, _they shouldn't have made you a noble, you mongrel, you doglord bitch,_ they'd said.

_You won't be biting when you're dead, dog, and we'll have your pretty mouth then._

She can hear it. Maker, but she can still hear it, for all that the lot of them are dead -- for all that she was there to see them die. Sliced through with blades, with her mabari's fierce teeth, skin burnt and curling away under onslaughts of magic. Skewered through with crossbow bolts. But she can't forget it, and it's like having ants crawling under her skin -- worse, because it's a memory instead of a metaphor, men instead of ants, eyes and fingers and tongues, _mindless,_ seeking digging moving hurting.

If she closes her eyes she'll see them too, see their flushed bodies and the grease in their teeth -- and that much, she can't bear. She stares at the ceiling instead, avoiding the sight of her bruises. Her own nudity seems like an affront now: unthinkable, that people should have such bodies, that they should be so vulnerable, so capable of pain, of giving it or taking it, of feeling its rawness down to the bone.

There's still the taste of salt in her mouth, but its only source is her own exhausted tears, nothing more, and that at least is an improvement.

Around Hawke, the water curls pink, and in spite of everything she's tired enough to let the world blur out at the edges. It's not a restful sort of dozing, senses that can't help but be on alert and the bath starting to go cold around her. When someone raps on the door, she nearly jumps out of her clammy skin.

_I don't need anything,_ she means to say, but it's not her mother knocking.

"Mistress," calls Bodahn, "Master Tethras has just arrived."

+

There are some stories Varric will never tell.

Maybe he should. Maybe he should tell them, spit them in the faces of the people who think they know on whose body to place the blame, shout them at the people who think that someone's destiny can be boiled down to an ugly instance of assault, laugh them mirthlessly at anyone who thinks a person is a thing you can take and scar and fuck, and ruin forever. Maybe he should tell them because Hawke is the bravest person he's ever known, and for all his prowess, the words to make people _understand_ that have never been quite clear to him.

In his stories, Hawke laughs down dragons and stalks smugglers through the tunnels at night. She sets her jaw and shows her teeth and takes the Arishok's blade to her gut, and she lives to see his head rolling across the floor. She grieves and she triumphs, she _endures,_ she wraps an arm around her friends' shoulders and pulls them selfless through their tragedies. She never loses a fight. When the world plunges into chaos, when the city, _her_ city, plunges into despair, she points herself straight at the center of it, and she doesn't back down.

These are stories faithfully told, true to the last of them, and the parts he leaves out are the parts that never belonged to him in the first place -- the parts that begin with Varric thanking the Maker for the damned mabari, of all things; the parts that end with a room full of men deservedly dead and with Hawke's wide, wild eyes.

"Alive," she'd spat, when he'd asked her how she was, and after that there hadn't been much else to say. He'd given her his coat and she'd leaned on his shoulder, and after they'd gotten her home and she'd allowed Anders to give her the most extensive look-over she could bear (which wasn't very), she'd chased them all out of the house with hidden, downcast eyes.

Varric had gone obediently enough, had been back in his suite glaring dully at his fists before he remembered he believed in epilogues -- even to stories that he'll never tell.

+

She wants to see him and she doesn't, she wants to hate him and she doesn't, she wants to set the world on fire and she wants to hide in a corner and cry.

She manages to tug her robe on over her head, instead. She brushes her hair, she glares at herself in the mirror, and then she goes to curl up in the sitting room on the low couch by the fire.

Bodahn lets Varric in, looking square and solid in the doorway. Still missing his coat, but she can't remember for the life of her what she's done with it -- probably still wadded up angrily on the floor of the bathroom. She regrets it already, wishes she had the damn thing around her still: fine stitching and leather and too much time spent hunched with its owner over a writing table, soaking in the scent of the vellum, smelling like an old bound book, pockets lined with charcoal. Long sleeves, to let hang over the rope burns on her wrists. She tugs at the draping of her house robe and lets her eyes follow the patterns on the wallpaper as they ascend recklessly to the ceiling. Varric shifts in the entryway, boot scuffing the floor.

This is rude, she supposes. "Hi," she says, and doesn’t look at him -- that's rude too, but she can't quite manage to make herself do it. She thinks instead of how much she hates the hoarseness in her throat.

"Hey Hawke," Varric exhales in the unsure way of people who aren't certain that breathing should still be allowed, suns should still be rising -- such painful revelations hidden in the folds of a braid of time that never stops winding forward. Tragedies are only world-stopping in stories. Real people have to keep living, keep walking. Varric steps through the door.

Hawke notices the seams of his clothing, the way one slides and bunches over his shoulder, the strange vulnerability of his frame beneath a shirt that doesn't fit him as well as it could without thick leather to go over it. His sleeves twist and wrinkle at his elbows, and her eyes follow where they lead. He's got a sheaf of stuck vellum under one arm.

"So, you say if you want me gone, and I'll be out of here faster than a slippery nug," he says conversationally. "I've been meaning to tell you though, that I've got the newest chapter of _Hard in Hightown_ written. I've got it here, if you want to hear it."

His serials. Ridiculous. She feels herself snort. "Fine night for it."

"Any time's a good time for Donnen Brennicovick." He shuffles forward and executes the jerky little hop-vault he always has to do to manage to get up onto her furniture. "Except, I mean -- shut me up, feel free. Whatever you need. You wanna talk about it?"

Hands. Dirt. Grease. _Moving._ "Maker, no. Open the damn book." She tries to make her body relax into the couch. Elbows and back, still tense, cutting sharply into the fabric, but she does her best. Varric, encouraged, scoots closer, the solid shape of him blooming warm along her side. "I thought you never let anyone read these things until you've locked yourself in your room for a week and taken to them with enough red ink to sail to Antiva on."

He looks up and meets her gaze, and the sincerity she finds there is startling -- even the color of his eyes is startling, re-learning their common brown warmth, after she'd been so sure she was never going to see them again. "Come on, Hawke," he asks, "Have you ever met a rule without exceptions?"

She has no answer, and the moment tenses, snaps -- Varric goes back to shuffling through his manuscript. "Donnen Brennicovick certainly hasn't." She listens as he slips into his story-telling voice, and there's comfort in that, like the fit of a well-worn bit of armor, the taste of Corff's ale, awful in every way except the way in which it's familiar. Home, or something like it.

Safe?

Maybe. "This is the dirty guard who lives on the edge, yeah?"

"That's him," Varric rumbles. "Shit, where'd I put my--"

"Here," she says, and habit makes her fiddle open his belt pouch to pull out his glasses. Carved glass and twisted wire, dangling delicate from her fingers, and it's not different: to be reaching over him, touching him, rooting through his pockets. He's still Varric, and she's still -- she's still whoever she thought she'd been before. Battered. Battered, and it's not _all right,_ but. Not damaged enough to not rest her head on his shoulder. She'd been a little afraid of that, maybe, afraid that she'd lost more thing than she wanted to realize, and it's maybe why she'd sent him away. But this is fine enough, warm enough, and for now at least there's no need to push it farther. That her heart still has some room left for trust -- that is something to savor. The prickling beginnings of tears sting her eyes.

She closes them and pays more attention to the pattern of his breathing than to the story that he’s narrating, but it’s alright -- she gets the feeling that he’s paying more attention to how close she is, how alive she is, than he’s paying to the story too. _You should have been there sooner,_ she wants to say, but she knows he knows that. _Thank you for being here now,_ she also wants to say, but she knows he knows that too. “Don’t get all sappy on me, Hawke,” he admonishes when her sigh flutters the open collar of his shirt, and she can tell what he means by the fingers smoothing shaking through her still-wet hair.

“Varric,” she says, smile nudging her lips, in spite of the tears. “Don’t be a bastard.” His laugh is warm and low like the slowly-dying fire, soft as aged vellum, slightly crinkled around the edges. She carefully relishes the sound of it, and the knot in her chest eases, just a bit, and gently, without prompting, the world shifts back into motion.

+


End file.
